


The Witch of Kaer Gvaern

by dread_thehalfhanded



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game)
Genre: Background Emhyr/Yennefer, Canon Compliant, Drag Geralt hours, F/M, Gen, Get him ladies, Past Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Post-Break Up, Post-Canon, The Witcher Lore, Triss apologizes bc I said so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28003974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dread_thehalfhanded/pseuds/dread_thehalfhanded
Summary: A witch lives in the old swamp tower, they say. She is cruel and cross, prone to fits of rage and jealousy, and once turned the old river to crackling ice over want of a thimble. Leave her be, they say, shaking their little peasant heads, praying to their little peasant gods. From the whims of witches and wizards, Melitele deliver us!Yennefer, never particularly impressed by the foibles of the laity, ignored them.
Relationships: Emhyr var Emreis/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	The Witch of Kaer Gvaern

A witch lives in the old swamp tower, they say. She is cruel and cross, prone to fits of rage and jealousy, and once turned the old river to crackling ice over want of a thimble. Leave her be, they say, shaking their little peasant heads, praying to their little peasant gods. From the whims of witches and wizards, Melitele deliver us!

Yennefer, never particularly impressed by the foibles of the laity, ignored them.

When she first found the tower in the thrice-cursed swamp, she’d ignored that, too, pretended it wasn’t exactly why she’d come in the first place; on a rumor, on a whim, on the rumor of a whim that Geralt brought back from the wilds long ago. Another contract, another old portal long silent coaxed to life by an alchemist with more ambition than brains. Kalkstein, the fool.

When she inspected it, stepping gingerly over the crumbling threshold, it was for research purposes only. When, mid-inspection, she started calculating whether her bed would fit in the high circular keep—her beautiful, four-poster bed with black silk sheets and a white satin coverlet that held heat so well—it became all too apparent why she had come.

Of all the high and beautiful places in the world, all the mountain passes, all the quaint Toussaint villages, this? While she’d long held it a rule never to disappoint herself, this almost qualified.

The door on the tower could be primitively bolted shut twelve times, and the rubble of the portal easily maneuvered back into shape. Winding thorn bushes twice as tall as a man was high twisted over an old-half sunken path up to the door, crawling with archspores and kikimores. Even a Witcher would be heard long before you saw him.

In short, it was perfect.

At the height of summer, she opened the tower portal for the last time, and brought through all that a woman might need to work undisturbed. Carved furniture, three desks, an expensive Nilfgaardian alchemical set, half a library’s worth of notes on genetics, and all the star samples she could carry with a single spell. With her belongings scattered around her on the dirty floor, covered in booted muck and who knows what else, she held the magic in her palm for a moment—then shattered the portal’s frame with a bolt of energy. Before she could think better of it.

The stone fell, shattering, and she was alone. She sat, heavily, on the dresser, and sighed out loud, a hopeless sound that barely conveyed what she felt.

It is one thing to be bound to a man against your will for years, and to chafe against it. Quite another to have that bond stripped aside without so much as a goodbye.

Geralt… Well, Geralt had gone. As she had told him to. And still, she felt, felt like a chasm had opened before her two feet in the dark, where only solid stone had stood before, felt like a ship without anchor, a tree without roots, drifting on the wind—

She snorted at the well of emotion, and shoved it down. What, was it better, then to be a slave to a magic no one quite fully understood? This too, would pass, like an illness that must be overcome. And like an illness, best to quarantine until fully recovered.

Standing, she shook the feeling off like dust from her boots. For a woman who stood in the courts of Aederin and Nilfgaard, fought the hounds of the wild hunt and summoned the dead, she thought—this is an embarrassment. Besides, she had work to do.

\---

Cleaning the damn tower turned out to be the work of a week, and then some. Alchemists, she swore, hurling spell after spell at the stained floor in the great entry chamber, unable to get it quite clean. Whatever concoction he’d been working on had corroded the very stone itself, and left green grooves wherever it dripped and ran. In the end, she settled for rebuilding the staircase with the rubble from the ground floor, and smoothing the entry down to bare shale. With a few rugs, it was livable, if not particularly luxurious.

Three desks and a bed went into the upper chamber, with a larder on the ground floor and the promise of a portal into the village for provisions whenever reasonable. The trip through the swamp on foot rendered unnecessary through the gift of her magic. Magic, what makes so much possible, if only we have the strength to reach for it. 

Pouring a glass of wine, she stared out the tall chamber window at the summer evening, and smelt the swamp air rising. The click of spider fangs far down below, before her carefully-barred door. Such are the prisons we build for ourselves.

Still, in the morning, Avallach’s notes on genetics waited for her attentive eyes, and with all the time in the world, now—

No, we won’t be looking at that thought too closely.

She flipped through the first few pages again, just to test the waters, get a sense of what she had to work with, how deep the elf’s prying into the line of Lara Dorren aep Shiadhal really went.

The morning found her still there, devouring the pages, chasing the details of Ciri’s lineage through the centuries, fixed on details of hair, tooth, and eye. Silence chased her through the shuddering tower, her only company the howling wind, the rising stench, the monsters that crept outside her door—but she did not stop for it.

She did not have time to hear the silence, or to think of _him_ at all.

\---

For weeks, the silence reigned undisturbed. After the battle, the carnage, all with magic in their hands and hearts had gone their separate ways—some, the fools, to Novigrad, where they could wait to be burned at the stake like everyone else. Phil, Fringilla, Triss. A shame for any of them to survive the Hunt, survive Nilfgaard, only to lose to Radovid’s lackeys in the end—but greater women have done more foolish things. Like allow love in their doors.

She’d wondered though, if anyone had been left to look for her. Not that it mattered.

When a red rose of a portal bloomed in her office one morning, however, she was surprised.

“Triss,” she said from the center desk, not looking up from her own cramped handwriting. “I would not have expected you here.”

A head of red hair and a little tinkling laugh exited the portal, and Triss’s bright eye sparkled at her bright as ever. Expected someone, yes. You? Hardly.

“Why ever not? Of course, I would come see you, if I could find you. This place certainly is out of the way… Not your usual haunt.”

She seated herself comfortably in the only other chair in the room, a plush concession to a once-royal life in the corner. Yennefer looked up at her, surveying her closely. Dressed well, with care to the details, light of step and voice, makeup light but intentional. A new blouse, and it looked tailored by someone who knew what they were doing—and she tried not to hate her.

“You look well,” she said, avoiding the implicit question.

“You don’t,” said Triss, blunt even for her. “Why are you here, in the middle of nowhere, and apparently trying to memorize elven texts instead of sleep?”

“Maybe I am.”

“You know what I mean. Come on. You need a break. Have lunch with me?”

“We can have lunch here, I’ve bread and fruit enough.”

“That is NOT what I mean, Yen, come on. Let’s go into Vizima, at least, there’s a lovely café on the west side that makes the most amazing soufflé. Please?”

When Triss tilted her head just a little to the side and gave those pleading newborn calf-eyes, her success at court did start to make more sense. A master negotiator hiding in a child’s body with a woman’s wiles, and therefore impossible to stay angry with her for any length of time. If she could just look more like she hated you right back—like she _had_ to—that would make it easier.

Yen sighed.

“As you like.”

Triss clapped her hands, eager as a schoolgirl, still. How she’d led men and women, inspired them even—Yennefer refused to guess.

“Yes! Come on, we haven’t had a chance to catch up in forever—” a red-gold portal bloomed her hands, quickly and carelessly. They’d get where they needed to go, never mind the carnage caused on arrival.

Yennefer put down her papers regretfully, but did not take Triss’s offered hand as they stepped through.

\---

“I told you, didn’t I?”

A cup of warm coffee in her hands, a near-demolished plate of egg and cheese stuffed breadstuff before her, with the bright sun overhead, Yennefer grudgingly felt that this was nice. Old madam Fisheyes in the peasant village had never heard of more than one way to cook eggs.

“It is passable.”

“It is more than that, and you know it. Now, tell me where you’ve been, what you’ve been up to!”

“Only what you saw. I want to get through Avallach’s notes, or those we could salvage, anyway, and he had been writing for centuries. There is no lack of material. What of yourself?”

Triss pursed her lips, as though she wanted to keep asking, but had thought better of it.

“I’ve been around. Mostly Novigrad, and Oxenfurt. With Radovid dead and Nilfgaard marching on well, everything, I kept moving for a while. Kovir for a few months, but there’s no place like home.”

Yennefer wondered if that meant _I came back to see if Geralt had changed his mind and he hadn’t._

“Lots of travel,” she said aloud.

“Yeah,” Triss smiled, big eyes twinkling.

Sipping at the coffee, Yennefer knew they must look quite the pair. Triss, bright, bubbling, full of life and looking well as any woman who has ever left a man can look—and herself, ink-stained and tired, hair frizzed and blouse with days of wrinkles down the front.

She was ill. There could be no other explanation.

“And how is Geralt?” she forced the words out, changing the subject stiffly. Better they lay this on the table between them than skirt around it.

Triss blinked at her, a confused wrinkle in her pristine forehead.

“I don’t know, I assumed—” was that a hint of sadness in her voice? “—I assumed you…would know.”

“I do not,” said Yennefer. Why say any more than that? What was there to say of the damned ghost of a love that never should have been in the first place?

She swallowed the words down, and tried to look at Triss, whose face had washed with comprehension.

“So that’s why you’re hiding. He left you, too, oh Yen. I’m so sorry.”

“I left him,” she said, sharply, cutting off the saccharine sentiments, “I found a way to remove the wish. Nullify it. We found that there was nothing left, after that.”

Nothing left, but a shape where something had been, something you couldn’t quite see except out of the corner of your eye, a shadow, a dream. A haunting.

“I would have thought he’d find you again,” she went on, disallowing Triss the opportunity to vomit her feelings again, “After all, no wish bound you. And he needs a strong hand.”

He has a type, provided her most primitive brain.

Triss sighed, a little sad, but mostly tired.

“No, things with us are ever as they were after Loc Muinne. Seems to think we are ever the friends we were, before—well. Before.”

The old grievance. Half a world away, longing for her lover like a schoolgirl, while her best friend bedded him with no more than a thought—and he could do no more than apologize. What man, bereft of all that made him a man, makes love as his first endeavor?

What man? Most men, she thought, even as she knew the thought too broken, too bitter to be fair.

“It is past,” she said aloud, shaking her head.

The laughter of other tables drifted up to them in their balcony seats, male and female alike, and somewhere a bard droned off-key. A reminder that some parts of the world, at least, had returned to normalcy.

“Yes,” said Triss, slowly, breaking the silence. “But that doesn’t make it better. I owe you an apology, long overdue.”

“Well, don’t strain yourself.”

Triss frowned, but continued, “Oh, come on. I’m sorry. Not for what I started—I thought you were dead, for gods’s sake, but for my part of things, after—I shouldn’t have let it go on. I should have stopped him, I should have—I don’t know—"

“Triss,” said Yennefer, imploringly.

“No, I get to own this one,” she sighed. “It did no one any favors and was foolish of me to begin with.”

A confession, then? An apology, at least—more than expected. For all her foolishness, Triss did not apologize easily.

“Did you love him? Before anything happened between you—did you love him first?”

A guess, a guess on a guess. What it would solve, knowing? Nothing. Yet she asked anyway, such was the madness in her.

“I did,” said Triss, quietly. “I wanted him for years. A stupid little girl’s crush, doomed to failure—it would have passed, except. Well, you know.”

Yennefer did know.

“I do not hold it against you,” she said aloud, studying the teapot in the center of the table. Love is a terrible thing, whether or not it came about via djinn or more normal means. “I understand.”

She raised her eyes.

“Let us speak no more of it. We are as we ever were.” She put her hand out on the table, and Triss took it, smiling with her emotion painful to see in her eyes.

“Now, tell me, what is Phillipa up to in this new world? Don’t tell me she’s taking Nilfgaard lying down.”

“If anything,” Triss giggled, “they’re taking her.”

\---

“What, pray tell, the FUCK,” said Yennefer of Vengerberg, to her empty living room.

Triss had gone, leaving her alone with the sudden and inexplicable knowledge that she, Yennefer, famed for her grudges and quick anger, had accepted an apology. Without conditions, without restraint, without even extracting a little groveling. Just accepted, because she understood.

How can you understand a slight? Understand the theft of what is most precious, most intimate in another?

Blue light crackled from her fingertips, and she shot a bolt of magic into the bare wall across the room, leaving a charred stain. That, too—unacceptable. Loss of control, she heard the lessons still, even now, in the back of her mind.

Trembling with contained rage, she trailed up the stairs to the window, and threw it open to the sea of twisting kikimores in the mist below. She had half a mind to stalk down there and wade among them for a few minutes.

_Crack—_

Blue light crackled from her fingertips again, and again, and one by one the spiders prowling at her gate crumpled into the dust. Better, better use of that power, for now. Later she would think, calculate, determine the source of this inconsistency, the chink in her being.

So much for her gate guardians, meantime—but more would come, eventually.

\---

 _Later_ came with a sharp rapping at the door.

Yennefer looked up from the page of calculations regarding lunar cycles in the year 678, and blinked into the grey light of—morning? Evening? She wasn’t sure.

“Go away,” she called, with all the imperiousness she once used to threaten servants in Aederin.

“His majesty—” the strident voice of a terrified herald was cut off with a squeak. Yennefer blinked. What king was left in the world to bother her here?

“Yennefer. I know you are in there.”

Even from her office she would know that voice. Dark, dripping authority and bored with it, so far from suffering fools he became one himself, at times.

“Coming,” she called, putting down the pen and checking her reflection in the mirror for the first time in weeks.

Dark circles under her eyes, grey pallor to her cheeks, but eyes bright as ever and she was always dressed well enough for a king. Or an emperor. She twisted open the twelve locks and opened the door with a measured sweep.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded to know of Emhyr Var Emris, The White Flame Dancing on the Graves of His Foes.

“May I come in?” he asked, without even implying it was a command—and of course, for that, she had to let him in. Gods damn him.

“Fine,” she said, “But they stay outside.”

“They will stay,” said Emhyr, nodding to his guard. “Since you have been so kind as to clear the area of venomous insectoids.”

Deeply regretting that decision, Yennefer moved to let him inside, even as the guard-captain protested his concerns.

“Your imperial—But—”

“Save it, Joaquin. Your role is to attend to the spiders, when more undoubtedly arrive. I trust you will meet expectations.”

Joaquin’s own imagination appeared to fill in quite colorfully what would happen if he did not meet expectations, and he saluted, blushed, and nodded several times for good measure.

Emhyr swept through the door, cape trailing behind him, and Yennefer shut the door on his not-easily-gainsaid attendant’s face. If that chamberlain thought those rules didn’t apply to him, he was sorely mistaken. She locked all twelve locks, for good measure—then climbed the stairs to find the Emperor of the North and South helping himself to her wine.

“Why are you here?”

He poured her a glass of 1167, the nice stuff, that she’d been saving.

“You seem surprised, Yennefer.”

Her name, all three syllables drawn out and given equal weight; a veneration, an address. A looming command.

“You’ll have to forgive the disarray,” she said, only mostly sardonic, “I was not expecting visitors.”

Raising his glass to her, Emhyr nodded. She raised her own in weak imitation, irritated that he was here, that he’d made himself at home, but mostly that he’d surprised her and she hadn’t had a chance to change. Or sleep.

“The most talented mage in the North disappeared for months, only to be spotted once, in Vizima, dining with Triss Merigold, both a known accomplice and a known rival.” He smiled, a menace without teeth. “Forgive me for finding it worthwhile to keep an eye on you.”

“Keep an eye? Don’t flatter yourself, any fool can be sent to watch a sorceress.” Not, strictly speaking, true. She had disposed of many a fool in her time. “You came yourself, this answers nothing.”

Emhyr hummed, a non-answer that said she would have to figure it out herself and he would enjoy watching her squirm. For a moment, they sipped in silence, standing a few feet apart in the middle of her office in a tense truce. Behind him, the bed had become suggestive by its very existence, an unthinkable faux pas in an imperial presence.

“You portaled here, possibly alone,” she said, finally, uncomfortable with the silence and with the story now unfolding before her. “That regiment is from Vizima.”

“Yes,” he said, as though the answer lay clear as day before them.

When she did not react, but stayed poised as a hunted thing, he sighed, and stepped towards her, into her space. Heavy spiced perfume rolled off him, smelling of court, of intricacies of speech and step, midnight oil and authority. Each step quiet, purposeful, intentional, he held out his hand to her.

“You and I had an arrangement, once,” he said.

An arrangement? More like he possessed an uncanny knowledge of what she had been willing to do with her lovers in the past, and an odd fascination with seeing it for himself on a handful of clandestine occasions.

“No one in your palace of many wonders willing to sleep with you? I find that hard to believe,” she said, watching his cragged face, stalling.

He looked down at her with clear, tired eyes. “Perhaps there are. But none who offer quite what you do.”

She took his hand, sliding her white palm into his elegant brown one, with its gently tapered fingers.

“And what is that?”

Leaning in, he kissed her, a pressure of thin, confident lips against her own. He did not sigh, or shirk, but pressed in with all the slow-building fervor one could demand of a lover. When he pulled away, already clearly doing mental calculus about what could have been done better, what ought to be done next—she slapped him for the audacity of it.

She’d always liked that about him, his desire to learn, to improve. Never satisfied with anything less than the finest performance.

He smiled, the smallest upturn of lip, and did not need to say anything more.

Their sex began in much the same way that it had before—tension built over time, soft rope drawn over his wrists, ankles, crossed over his slender waist, naked back. If it thrilled her to think that the most powerful man in the world bent here, to her will, she mentioned it only once. She never mentioned it more than once, it was almost a ritual.

Leaning close over his ear, she whispered, “I could kill you, just here, like this.”

And he answered, like a prayer, “You could.”

The first round went as expected. She tied him up, and teased him, turned him on his belly, and then finally fucked him boneless over the space of about an hour. Her privilege, to hear his cries, his pleasure, her right, because who else could give like she could?

When she lay next to him—itself strange, she would usually simply leave him—something settled in her, discontented.

He blinked at her, sleepy, and for the first time, covered her with his arm. In anyone else, that would be an embrace—but the Emperor of Nilfgaard did not engage in such things. Nor did she, she thought belatedly, as she remembered again, the skin of the old self. So long absent from a world without a wish in it, she’d almost forgotten. She had gotten so very good at loving, and leaving.

Emhyr curled closer—that was absolutely a cuddle, your highness—and that. That was nice.

She let him stay like that until she fell asleep.

In the morning, she woke wrapped around him, and instead of disentangling herself and letting them both live with the embarrassment, they had sex again—in the more traditional way, for the first time.

They dressed without a word, and she did not see him to the door, but before he left, he turned on the stairs.

“I may come again. If you would have me, Lady Yennefer.” 

“Don’t ingratiate yourself to me, it doesn’t suit you,” she snapped, already hoping he would come again and feeling nothing in particular about that hope except an odd sort of embarrassment. 

She should have been angry. These were not the terms of their arrangement, a passionate tryst in the middle of nowhere, an emperor’s duties shirked, a coupling of pleasure for the sake of pleasure? A year ago, she’d have turned him out on his head the night before, emperor or no—

He nodded, once, and took his leave. Closing her eyes, she heard his footsteps on the stairs, down, out the door, then the clank of cavalry mustered from their asses and the readying of horse and steel.

The door shut behind him. She locked all twelve locks, took a very long bath, and went back to bed.

\---

Avallach hadn’t lied. The notes he left behind indicated that the genetics of Ciri’s lines, on both sides, had been the work of a lifetime, and one that stretched out far beyond a mortal timeline. Centuries of material, certainly—but such clinical material. Not a word about context clues, or political climates, or even small things like religion, local cults, not even common crops in the area. He’d taken such detailed notes about what didn’t matter: hair, voice, date of birth, star cycles, even the favored pets of all these individuals—but missed what would have made them human, grounded them in the world they belonged in.

Late into an early morning, Yennefer leaned over yet another history textbook—borrowed per force from the Oxenfurt library—and hissed at the pages. It didn’t make any _sense._

Better than ever before she understood why these things mattered to masters of statecraft. It was never about the man that stood before you, the hat on his head or the words in his mouth. What color his hair glittered in the sun, or whether he sired boy-children or not. No, not at all. What mattered about a man was his gods, his drinking buddies, and what food he enjoyed at the end of a long day.

Know those things, and you knew the man before you’d ever spoken a word to him. That, in essence, formed the foundation of a successful career at court: Knowing who was speaking to you, what they wanted, and why, without a word having to be said. In essence, politics. Pity she hadn’t studied it better when she had the chance.

Dropping her head in her arms, she closed her eyes for a brief moment and allowed herself the weakness of indulging in what-ifs. As if to add insult to injury, a very loud bird trilled just outside the window, adding to the list. If she had stayed in Aederin, if she had never met a wet-fanged wolf witcher, if her daughter had not been the heir of Nilfgaard and Cintra and all of space and time…

What, then?

She knows the answer, knows that nothing would be as it is, that the woman who does not sleep and sits at her desk far too late into the morning would not be as she is without all those choices—

And yet, perhaps she regrets it a little. Regrets the empty place in her bed, the shadow of warm arms, the ghost of a daughter whose childhood is long gone, and all that is left is sun-warmed dust, settling onto the paving stones of a ruined tower.

It would be easier to hate him, hate the presumption and the masculine need to protect that cast such a spell over her years, leaving behind a gnawing ache, a lack of something needy, nameless. But it is impossible to hate in such circumstances.

“I can hear you thinking from all the way over here.”

Looking up, she saw her daughter climbing light-footed in the tower window for all the world like an errant schoolgirl caught playing truant.

“Ciri?”

Her sudden laughter surprised them both.

\---

“Where have you been? Tell me all about it. Are you healthy? Eating enough?”

“Mother!” laughed Ciri, rocking dangerously on the narrow roof, half-obscured under the stars.

The tower had an observatory, once, but such superfluous niceties such as a telescope, a roof, or access from inside the tower had long since gone. With the stairwell blocked with rubble and magically sealed, Ciri had portaled them to the sheer, flat stone that crowned just over the swamp’s tree line.

“I’m doing well, better than ever, if you must ask the most boring questions ever. Ready for some new magic lessons, if I can ever get over that awful equation. But when did you become an old biddy?”

“When my only daughter went out on the Path and left me here to worry,” said Yennefer, knowing that Ciri would understand the edge of humor and not take it too seriously. She had better things to do than chase after a festering child, after all.

“Well, you’ll be glad to know that I have been very careful, and only taken boring old contracts on drowners and necrophages recently. Nothing else in the area, although I heard tell of a cockatrice further south. I’m starting to suspect Geralt of weeding out the area of juicy jobs. He would do that.”

Yennefer nodded. He would, not for Ciri’s sake, if he’d stopped to think on it, but mostly because he never did stop to think. Liked to pretend he was the only witcher in the world.

“Sorry, you probably don’t want to talk about him.”

“We can talk about him. We raised you together, just because we’re not together anymore doesn’t mean I don’t care about him.”

She tried to sound natural, neutral, blasé, even. As if she had long gotten over whatever strange haunting the djinn had left her, as if she did not wake every morning with the ghost of hands she did not know on her waist.

Ciri glanced at her suspiciously, but did not follow up.

“Then you’ll be glad to know he’s doing fine too. Saw him recently, even. Got a couple new swords, Path is paying him well this year.”

She stopped with something in her voice that said there was more on her mind.

“Spit it out,” said Yennefer, impatient. She hated feeling like people were afraid of her, afraid to say things to her, cringing and scraping like a couple of fools, and Ciri should know better.

“You might get mad.”

“Better go ahead and tell me then.”

Ciri wrapped her arms around her knees and rocked back and forth a few times, looking for all the world like a child with a secret and not one of the most deadly women on the continent.

“I… Met a girl,” she said finally, staring out at the low moon.

“Oh?” What she wouldn’t give to know the kind of woman that struck her daughter’s fancy. As long as she was good with her hands, didn’t mind uncertainty, and knew when to be quiet, she’d do fine for Ciri. “As long as it’s not a sorceress, you have nothing to fear from me. In fact, I’m excited. Who is she?”

“Do you know Ves? From the Temerian army, friend of Roche’s?”

Yennefer did not. They talked briefly about this woman, and from the way Ciri’s face lit up with a joy and enthusiasm too long absent, Yennefer liked her already. Young, short hair, verteran of several wars, good with a blade, with a heart of gold, all sounded exactly what her daughter would like, if she’d been asked to guess.

“I’m happy for you,” she said, after some intense descriptions of fingering technique that sounded painful to her but appeared to have been very exciting. “I hope to meet her one day.”

“I’d like that.”

They sat in silence for a while after that. Clouds drifted over the face of the moon, and Yennefer reflected how long it had been since she had simply sat and enjoyed her adult daughter. Not a child, or a pupil, or a weapon of time and space that needed rescuing—but simply, as a woman. As a friend.

She opened her mouth to say as much just as Ciri said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

Ciri took a deep breath, then said, very quietly, “What happened between you and Geralt?”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“No. I mean, yes, but not really. You know how he is. Just said you broke the curse, and that was it, like that mean everything was over, contract fulfilled.”

Yennefer hummed. Yes, he would simplify it that way.

“That’s not far off,” she said aloud, unwilling to drive a wedge anywhere it didn’t need to go. “When we met, a djinn bound us, and all our time together was because of that binding. I broke the binding, and the relationship went with it.”

That was the simple version of things.

The truth of it was that they had tried. They’d broken the spell, kissed, said nothing had changed and then retired together after the end-of-the-world-that-wasn’t. That first night alone, they’d tried to make love in hearth-warmed blankets with the snowfall outside, bodies in the drifting shadows and nothing against them but time. But there’d been no passion in it. Skin, in the end, just skin. Just a shadow, a flame blown out and nothing left in their bed but the ashes.

For weeks, they’d tried, holed up together in that little cabin in the skellige mountains, going through the motions of a dead romance. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. Couldn’t look at him, his kind, gentle, objectively handsome face, and feel nothing at all instead of the old swooping happiness she used to feel every time he set eyes on her.

She’d told him to leave. After a week, long enough for him to get anywhere in the world but where she was, she’d left too. Their sweet little cabin locked, forever empty, until some bandit broke in to loot what was left of a long-dead love.

“It’s… hard to believe,” said Ciri slowly. “He loved you so much.”

Ah. Past tense. Somehow, the saying of it all, out loud, made the witcher-shaped shadow that ever stepped just out of her gaze fade a little into the night.

“As I did him,” she said, idly thinking that this was a strange was to teach her child how to navigate the inevitable separation of a relationship. “But it needed to happen. Can’t live under a curse.”

“I thought it was a wish?”

“If someone else wished you to do or say or be something you didn’t want to, wouldn’t that be a curse? If Emhyr had tried to make you Empress, when you wanted your freedom more than anything else, wouldn’t that be a curse?”

Ciri nodded, but looked doubtful.

“Sure. But you did want to.”

“Not with magic, I didn’t.”

Humming her understanding, Ciri turned back to the sky.

“I guess I see that. Doesn’t mean I’m not sad to see you both suffering, but I get it.”

“I’m not suffering,” said Yennefer quickly.

“Whatever you say,” snorted her rude and insubordinate child, gesturing at the swamp around them.

“Yes, whatever I say, because I am the mistress of this tower and you are my guest, as much as my pupil.” The girl had come for lessons, hadn’t she? Enough sniveling together. “Show me the new portal mechanics you’ve been working on.”

Ciri scrambled to her feet faster than Yennefer could rise, carefully and meticulously brushing dust from each part that had touched the ground as they spoke.

“As you like, headmistress.”

Her hands flashed, and a green-gold portal in the shape of a pair of bird’s wings opened like doors, with the interior of the tower clearly visible inside.

Pride swelled in her chest. Her daughter’s magic would ring through Avallach’s legends, and those like him, for millennia.

\---

Ciri stayed for a week, practicing magical control, inventing new temporal equations, and casually pointing out inconsistencies in Avallach’s notes until Yennefer considered bringing up Emhyr’s visit just to get her to leave. Not that she didn’t love and adore her daughter, but she did make it absolutely impossible to work through the night without a reprimand.

Emhyr, obviously, would know she was still alive, and was probably over his initial period of sulking over his heir not wanting to accept his empire. Still, better to let Ciri discover this on her own time. They had never mentioned Geralt directly since that first night, but the weight of knowing that the subject might come up again was exhausting.

Finally, with a quick hug and a kiss, Ciri announced her departure on the eighth day since her arrival, and blinked herself out of the tower with a wave. Ah, blessed silence. Blessed peace, at last, to concentrate finally on this knotty problem of dimension in in the singular cell.

Left alone with her work again, Yennefer sat down in her desk chair for three minutes before tears trickled unbidden down her cheeks. She scrubbed at them, ungainly, angry at the welling sensations in her breast and the utter loneliness that gnawed at her very flesh and bone. 

\---

Months passed in the swamp without another knock or flash of magic like a welcome home. Once known, most of the relevant world seemed content to pass her by. For the most part, this was fine with Yennefer. At least, she did her best to think on it little enough, and only when strictly necessary.

Avallach’s notes, while initially promising, proved to be something of a dead end in the time occupation department. The amount of research that could be done appeared more and more endless, with no particular narrative or analysis in sight. The people on these pages were just that: People. Little enough in common across time besides the paint and trim.

For a time, Yennefer contented herself with finding those patterns, tracing eye color down through the years as though she expected to find some insight in it. When that failed, she followed hair, then nails, then nose shape. Important information to have, to organize, to understand, she knew, if ever the time came where it was needed—

But when three soft knocks sounded at her big locked door, she ran down the steps as fast as her booted feet would carry her. She even entertained the thought of a portal for a brief, absurd moment. Who could it be? Triss, Emhyr, Ciri, Phillippa, even Fringila, she would not mind.

Geralt, warned the last guess, at the back of her thought. But that would be absurd, he would not come here in the arms of winter, not with the keep so far. And besides, even if he did, she was busy.

She flipped open the last lock, straightened her shoulders back, and opened the door to see: A woman.

A strange little brown woman, in a brown coat too small for her, clutching a little basket to her chest and looking nervously over her shoulder. A peasant, judging by the teeth missing and the cower in her posture.

Yennefer felt absurdly like an Aen Elle for a moment, before the peasant cast herself at her feet.

“Please, witch! Please help me. It’s my boy, he’s sick!”

The woman trembled as though she expected to be struck by lightning for this very menial request.

“I’m not a healer,” she said, feeling that the obvious should be stated first.

“Ye’s a witch, ain’t ya?” came the muffled, if confused voice.

“Get up,” said Yennefer. “I am a sorceress.”

She supposed that counted as a witch for most people, ignoring the semantics involved with which ones got burned at the stake and which ones didn’t.

Scrambling to her feet, the woman looked up in awe. “Never seen a sorceress before. Can you do magic?”

“Yes.”

Yennefer of a year ago might have lied, might have taken the woman’s memory and portaled away, might have walked over this creature of mud and bones with not an ounce of regret in her little pointed heels.

Yennefer of today looked down and sighed.

“What are his symptoms?”

The woman blinked.

“His what now?”

“Tell me what’s wrong with him, in detail.”

\---

In the beckoning swamp that creeps, each year, another few feet towards Vizima and will one day swallow it whole, a tower stands crumbling and tall against the sky. The peasants who live in the huts and holes nearby call it “Kaer Gvaern”, the tower of the mistress. This is for good reason, as a witch lives in the tower—and she is every inch the land’s mistress.

The witch of Kaer Gvaern is not a bad ruler. She is proud, often stern, and sad, but gives generously to those who have need, and ask. And every once in a while, when the wind blows from the north or her daughter comes to call, she smiles.


End file.
